The Black Hole of Auschwitz by Levi Primo; Belpoliti Marco; Wood Sharon

Author:Levi, Primo; Belpoliti, Marco; Wood, Sharon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2017-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

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The Black Hole of Auschwitz

The current polemic in Germany between those who are inclined to banalize the Nazi massacres (Nolte, Hillgruber) and those who claim its uniqueness (Habermas and many others) cannot be a matter of indifference to us. The thesis of the former is scarcely new: there have been massacres down the centuries, above all at the beginning of our own century, especially against the ‘class enemy’ in the Soviet Union, and thus near the German borders. Over the course of the Second World War we Germans did no more than adopt a practise that was dreadful, but by now well established: an ‘Asiatic’ practise of massacre, mass deportation, merciless exile to hostile (inhospitable) regions, torture and the splitting up of families. Our only innovation was a technological one: we invented the gas chambers. We should say in passing that it was precisely this innovation that was denied by the school of ‘revisionists’, the followers of Faurisson, and thus the two positions complement each other in turn in a system of interpretation of history which can only set alarm bells ringing.

Now, the Soviets cannot be absolved. First the massacre of the kulaks, then the iniquitous trials and the innumerable and cruel acts against real or presumed enemies of the people are very grave indeed, and have led to the political isolation of the Soviet Union which in various guises lasts to this day. But no legal system absolves a killer because there are other killers in the house over the road. And besides, it is beyond doubt that these were matters to do with the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, which nobody from outside could have opposed except through a generalized war.

The new German revisionists, then, tend to present Hitler’s massacres as a preventive defence against an ‘Asiatic’ invasion. This seems to me an extremely fragile thesis. It remains to be demonstrated that the Russians were intent on invading Germany; on the contrary they feared her, as is shown by the hurried Ribbentrop-Molotov pact; and they were right to fear her, as the later, sudden, German attack in 1941 was to show. Besides, it is not clear how the ‘political’ massacres operated by Stalin could find their mirror image in Hitler’s massacre of the Jewish people, when it is well established that before Hitler rose to power, German Jews were profoundly German, intimately integrated into the fabric of the country and considered as the enemy only by Hitler himself and the few fanatics who first followed him. The identification of Judaism with Bolshevism, Hitler’s idée fixe, had no basis in objective fact, especially in Germany where notoriously the vast majority of Jews belonged to the bourgeoisie.

It is true that ‘the Gulag came before Auschwitz’ but we should not forget that the aims of these two infernos were not the same. The first was a massacre between equals; it was not based on racial supremacy, nor did it divide men into the superman and the subhuman; the second was based on an ideology imbued with racism.

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